Over the holidays I introduced my younger brother to the game. I sat with him as he set out on his doomed space journey, giving him what few tips I had, introducing him to the systems---basically giving him the intro to the game that I didn't really have. I figured any little bit of help would be needed since he was bound to die sooner than later.

The first sector went by without a hitch. Same with the second sector.

My brother's Kestrel came across various jumps with no enemies and plenty of loot. By the third sector he'd found a Halberd Beam and had saved more scrap than I'd ever managed to save, while still upgrading his crew, shields, and guns.

A couple sectors later he had a functional drone system, all three guns, a diverse crew, and had never once encountered a solar flare or a slaver ship, and had been boarded only once...by two humans. Yes, this was smooth sailing. Only once did he come close to dying, when the rebels managed to nearly catch him.

In other words, this first run was charmed---so charmed that he made it all the way to the final boss before dying. This was on his very first run with only the help of a relative novice and no real moments of genius. Just lots and lots of luck.

And yet, even with all that good luck, the end proved too difficult. The final boss made short work of him.

The two biggest criticisms of the game I've read so far are that too much of the outcome of each run is determined by luck and that the difficulty curve at the final boss is simply too steep. My brother's play through adds weight to both these critiques and lends meaning to the term "beginner's luck." His second run ended quickly and ended badly.

I think that the game also requires a great deal of skill, but the luck factor is problematic. Luck is an important part of any game, but when you tilt the scales too far in that direction you risk impacting player agency in a potentially detrimental way.

I suppose what I'd like to see is this same game---another spaceship strategy sim---with less randomness just to see how that might change the game for better or worse.

A game like Dark Souls allows you to plan your character-build around different challenges and ambitions because you can plan ahead to a large degree (if you've played before at least.) If anything, I think Dark Souls may sit on the other side of the spectrum from FTL; it's simply not random enough, with no surprise enemy encounters outside of invasions at all.

In a sense, randomness serves as a test of our planning, while a game that relies too much on luck doesn't take into account player skill as much as it ought to. The question is one of balance, I suspect. Somewhere along that spectrum between hard-but-too-random and hard-but-too-predictable is the sweet spot between planning and luck.